This is not a “gotcha! checkmate idiots!” post, I’m genuinely curious what you think about this. This is the forum for asking questions right?
I have very niche interests. I like specifically shaped plushies of a specific franchise called fumos. I like data hoarding so I like being able to buy a 16TB hard drive and just dump whatever the fuck I find on the internet on it. I like commissioning gay furry porn. I can think of many other niche things. A specific brand of cheese I like, a specific brand of shoes that don’t hurt my feet, specific kinds of fashion I like to wear, etc etc etc.
I like being able to do these things despite them not really appealing to a huge majority mass of people. And I understand why I can do that in capitalism: because it’s a market everyone can sell stuff in and people (theoretically) chose what to buy, instead of it being chose for them. Thus, it’s viable and sometimes even optimal to find a niche to appeal to rather than to make something general and for everyone. That’s why it’s profitable to make fumos.
Under a planned economy, how exactly can this work, though? An overseeing body will care about an overarching goal, and therefore things that are not useful to achieve that goal will be pushed back or completely discarded. Put yourself in the lens of some top-of-the-hierarchy bureaucrat: why bother making something like fumos? It’s a luxury no one truly needs. It’s a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. Why bother with 16tb hard drives for personal computers? Most people don’t need more than 1tb or 2tb. Better to just give those to state companies that need them for servers and such. Giving them to data hoarders is again, a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. You can just save (what you deem) important things in a central archive.
I know I am talking purely about luxuries, but these things can be severe too. Why bother finding treatments for illneses that affect only very small percentages of the population? Why bother with clothes that can fit specific body shapes that are not found in the vast majority of people without hurting them? Why make game controllers shaped for the minute proportion of people that don’t have five fingers?
Actually why make games in the first place, even? Wouldn’t it be counter productive? That shit can lead to addiction and workers slacking off, meaning less productivity. From the point of view of The Administration it’s only a waste of time. It furthers the goal more if there’s no games. Why fund them?
I understand this kind of thing sort of happened in the USSR, there being very few brands of things to pick from, all the economy being spent on the army instead of things that made people happy, etc. I’m no historian so I’m not going to dwell on it specifically too much though.
I don’t want to live in a world where everything is only made if it fits The One General Purpose. I guess the reply to this would be “fine, some things can be independent”, but what is allowed to be independent and what isn’t? How is that decided? How can we be sure it’s enough?
For the record, I don’t think niche things can only exist with a profit incentive. But I do think they can’t exist without an incentive at all. If the body that controls all the funding and resources has no incentive, even if people out of the kindness and passion in their hearts want to do these things, if the government says “no, that’s useless”, there’s nothing they can do.
I also don’t think the solution to this can be “well just make sure The Administrators do allow these things”, systematically they have an incentive to never do it, and a system that depends on a dice roll for nice people over and over and over is not a system I’d ever trust
Anyway thanks for reading. I mean no ill harm this is an actual question. o/
[pictured: a fumo]
Not intending this in any inflammatory way, but this is a utilitarian liberal understanding of what a planned economy is for because you’re not questioning the fetishized capitalist “productivity” mindset.
Is there a material reason we need to exclude portions of the population from planning or is it just because it’s what you thought of? In the real world and all throughout human history, humans have gone out of their way to help and support each other, even the ones that “weren’t productive”. Is a wheelchair a luxury? Are glasses a luxury? Are cancer drugs a luxury? Is joy and amusement a luxury? If you presuppose that you must do things in the most efficient, most productive way that serves the biggest portion of the population only, then they probably are.
As a supplement, I would highly recommend checking out the Srsly Wrong podcast’s episodes on Library Socialism, which imagine alternative property relations that can only come about through a planned economy.
It doesn’t have to be about productivity though. The Goal can be any other thing. Industrialization, militarization, independence, whatever. Whatever The Goal is, the planned economy is subservient to it, and that may result in the things I’ve been concerned about in this post
That’s not something specific to a planned economy though. Under capitalism The Goal is something determined by the owning class to facilitate further capital accumulation because it’s the fundamental mechanism to exert control over an economy, whether planned or market based. As always capitalism remains the problem!
oh yeah I didn’t say it was any different in capitalism, it’s the same thing. I’m trying to tell you it’s mostly the same thing. it’s the position of massive control over the economy paired with a goal thats the problem to me, not the ideology of the people in that position, that can lead to variations but the problems with the approach are the same either way
Right, we agree on that. My disagreement is that because communism has completely different property relations and no capital accumulation, a planned economy cannot functionally work the same as under capitalism.
can you elaborate?
Communism as full political-economic system requires the abolition of private property through common ownership and the abolition of the commodity form in favour of need based distribution (use value instead of exchange value). Under capitalism, even if there is common ownership of production, the commodity form compels capital accumulation because distribution of commodities is based on their capital-value not their use-value, so a planned economy in this state is still stuck with planning around capital efficiency. Likewise, by abolishing the commodity form but not socializing ownership of production, a planned economy is still controlled by the small owner class (this was essentially what feudalism was). However, when we combine these two changes together and try a planned economy we now have a socialized ownership class that must use something other than capital as its central planning mechanism, which to communists is based on need.
TL;DR / e.g. “we have X number of people that need insulin, so we must produce that much insulin” vs “we have X number of people that need insulin, how can we price it to produce more insulin” vs “we do not need to produce insulin because the minority ownership does not need it” And you can substitute insulin in for whatever else.
What would ensure the central planning mechanism always puts the needs of the people as the goal, and not the needs of the central planning structure, or the needs to perpetuate and protect it?
The people are part of the planning structure so there’s not necessarily a conflict, although I understand what you’re getting at.